A hundred and twenty-seven dollars

Every July, Retraite Québec pays parents a supplement for the purchase of school supplies: $127 per child aged 4 to 16 for 2026–2027, regardless of income (Narcity, July 2026). Parents spend it as they see fit: a new backpack, the pencils the child likes, or cheap notebooks and the rest on groceries.

On August 26, 2026, Québec solidaire proposed replacing that cheque. The Centre d’acquisitions gouvernementales, the government’s central purchasing agency, would buy supplies in bulk, and the state would then distribute them to all parents, whatever their income. Ruba Ghazal estimated the savings at $60 per child, plus the time parents would save at back-to-school (Noovo, August 2026).

She admitted the measure would also help well-off families who don’t need it, but insisted on avoiding any stigma at school. The argument is telling: so that no one stands out, everyone gets the same box.

Two years earlier, in August 2024, the same party demanded the opposite: doubling the cheque from $121 to $242, at a cost of $140 million. Ruba Ghazal said at the time that a full backpack is not a luxury (Noovo, August 2024). In two years, cash for parents went from necessity to a problem to be fixed.

This reversal is no campaign detail. It betrays a conviction: the state knows better than parents what belongs in their children’s backpacks. The same conviction underpins supply management, the fear of failure, and the blindness of the neighbourhoods that vote for it to what their comfort costs others.

The state pencil

A cheque is always worth at least as much as a parcel of the same value. It is one of the simplest results in economics: with $127, parents can buy exactly what the state would have bought, or something better suited to what they know about their child. With a parcel, they get what an official planned for an average child who does not exist.

And supply lists are not the same from one school to the next, or even from one class to the next. Many ask parents to reuse last year’s supplies if they are still in good shape. A central buyer must therefore choose: standardize the lists and take that choice away from teachers, or handle thousands of different lists and lose the advantage of volume. Either way, some of the notebooks will end up at the back of a closet.

Then everything has to be stored, shipped and handed out. In 2024, Québec solidaire itself counted 1.65 million children covered by the supplement. At the current amount, that is about $210 million a year flowing through a single window, instead of being spent in hundreds of stationery stores, pharmacies and dollar stores that compete with one another every August.

That window already has a record. In November 2024, the auditor general found that many of the group purchases the Centre d’acquisitions gouvernementales had planned never took place; running behind schedule, it signed contracts without tenders to keep services from stopping. As for the $407.9 million in savings it credits itself with, she called its method of calculation “sometimes questionable” (Noovo, November 2024).

This is the agency that would be handed back-to-school for all of Québec, with a fixed deadline and no margin for error. A delay would no longer mean a renewed contract; it would mean children without notebooks on the first day of school. One can guess what kind of contract gets signed under those conditions.

I am not accusing anyone of corruption. I am describing a structure. When a single buyer awards hundreds of millions in contracts every year, suppliers no longer compete for parents; they compete for a handful of decision-makers. Québec has seen this film: the Charbonneau Commission documented collusion in public construction contracts, and in December 2025 the Gallant report found that the SAAQ’s leadership had concealed for years the cost explosion of SAAQclic, now estimated at no less than $1.1 billion (Noovo, December 2025).

The market is not virtuous. It is simply harder to corrupt, because purchasing power is scattered across millions of hands. Centralizing purchases creates a target.

Virtue paid for at the grocery store

In a university seminar, supply management has everything going for it. It protects the family farm from American giants, stabilizes prices, keeps the countryside alive. One leaves convinced of having stood up for the weak. Yet the question rarely asked there is the simplest one: who pays?

The mechanism is well known. Quotas limit the production of milk, eggs and poultry; prohibitive tariffs block imports beyond small quotas. Canadian prices therefore stay above market prices. The difference does not vanish: it is paid at the checkout.

The first to pay is the consumer, and the poorest first of all. In June 2026, the Montreal Economic Institute, a pro-market think tank, put the cost at $224 per person per year: 1.25% of the income of the poorest households, against 0.33% for the richest. It draws on a 2015 study in Canadian Public Policy: the lower the income, the larger the share of the household budget this cost takes. By the institute’s calculations, the policy keeps 41,279 Canadian households below the low-income threshold (MEI, 2026).

The second to pay is the young farmer. In Québec, the right to produce one kilogram of butterfat per day has been capped at $24,000 since 2015 (UPA Montérégie). A 100-kilogram quota therefore costs $2.4 million before buying a single cow. Supply management does not protect “farmers”; it protects those already inside, against those who would like to get in.

The third to pay is the rest of the economy. In June 2025, Parliament passed Bill C-202, introduced by the Bloc Québécois, which forbids any trade concession on these tariffs (Parliament of Canada). Just as Canada was renegotiating with the United States, the C.D. Howe Institute observed that the law ties the hands of our negotiators (C.D. Howe, July 2025). Aluminum, lumber and autos now negotiate with one arm tied behind their back.

This is not solidarity. It is a private rent guaranteed by the state, paid for in part by the single mother buying milk. The seminar sees the farmer it protects; it does not see the shopper paying at the checkout.

A world without bankruptcy

Behind the box of pencils lies a vision of a world where nothing fails. No stationery store closes, no farm disappears, no public investment is lost, no recession interrupts the promises. It is a comfortable world. It is not ours.

In a market economy, failure is information. The store that sells pencils that break loses its customers to the one across the street, and money flows to where it is better used. Joseph Schumpeter called it creative destruction: the disappearance of those who serve badly is the price of the arrival of those who serve better.

A single supplier chosen by tender has no such problem. Its pencils can break; it keeps the contract until the next call for tenders, and the child keeps the broken pencils. The dissatisfied parent no longer has a store across the street. He has a complaint form.

Investment obeys the same law. A venture capitalist knows that most of his bets will fail and that a single success will pay for the rest. The state cannot admit that it is betting. Every project is presented as a sure success, until the day bankruptcy comes anyway and no one is responsible. Denying failure does not prevent it; it only prevents it from teaching anything.

Then there are cycles. Universal promises are made in times of growth and paid for in times of recession. In the fall of 2025, Québec was already forecasting a $12.4 billion deficit for 2025–2026, or 1.9% of GDP (CFFP, December 2025). That is the context in which the campaign paraded its new universal programs. A family that reasoned this way would be called reckless; a party that does it calls itself generous.

Finally, everything has a cost. This is not ideology; it is arithmetic. Every notebook handed out for free was made, shipped, stored and paid for by someone. Refusing that arithmetic is not compassion. It is the luxury of those who never see the bill arrive at their own door.

The bill the central neighbourhoods never see

On October 5, Québec solidaire won nine ridings, mostly in Montréal. There its ideas seem self-evident, because people live surrounded by services whose payer they never see. They get around on foot, by bike, by metro; the metro seems as natural as tap water.

It is not. Public transit in the metropolitan region is funded by riders, by municipalities, and by motorists across the region, through fuel and vehicle registration taxes. Since January 1, 2025, every owner of a passenger vehicle in the Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal has paid a $150 registration tax instead of $59, to cover $361 million of a $561 million transit deficit (Noovo, May 2024).

The person paying that tax is often someone living in an outlying borough, in Laval or on the South Shore, who drives because no metro runs near their home. They fund the line that someone without a car takes downtown. The leader of the opposition at city hall, Aref Salem of Ensemble Montréal, said at the time that this “draconian increase punishes drivers who have no other choice when it comes to public transit” (Noovo, May 2024).

Québec solidaire’s response to the increase is telling. Its MNA Alexandre Leduc dubbed it the “Guilbault tax,” after the transport minister, and called for Québec to pay more instead (Noovo, May 2024). In other words: not the driver from Laval, but the taxpayer from all of Québec. In the same report, the minister, Geneviève Guilbault, put it this way: “All of Québec’s regions cannot systematically absorb half-billion-dollar deficits for public transit in Greater Montréal.”

The arts follow the same logic. Since the March 2025 budget, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec has $200 million a year in program funding for three years; the programs of the SODEC, the provincial agency for cultural businesses, get more than $125 million for 2025–2026 (Québec budget plan, March 2025). Add to that the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts de Montréal.

I am not saying artists live in luxury. Most earn little, and they said so in the streets in 2025. I am saying that a jury’s judgment has replaced the public’s. A work few people want to see can be funded; a work many people want to see must first convince a committee. That is not a crime. It is a privilege, paid for in part by people who will never set foot in those theatres.

The same goes for subsidized daycare, free schooling, health care and family allowances. These gains do not hold because the central neighbourhoods produce them. They hold because the whole economy, its mines, forests, factories, truckers and offices, generates enough surplus to fund them without much thought. And by not thinking about it, people end up mistaking a transfer for a right.

Generosity with other people’s money

Back to the box of pencils. Québec solidaire’s promise is not absurd because it is generous. It is absurd because it confuses generosity with control. A cheque tells parents: here is some help, you know better than we do what your child needs. A box tells them: here is what you will get.

Supply management, the box of pencils and the services of the central neighbourhoods have one thing in common. Each is a benefit visible to whoever receives it and invisible to whoever pays for it: the single mother at the grocery store, the parent who would have chosen differently, the driver from Laval, the taxpayer in Rimouski.

In 2024, Québec solidaire wanted to double the cheque; in 2026, it wanted to replace it with a parcel. Between the two proposals, only one thing stayed the same: neither began by asking who would pay.

A party that wants to govern for everyone should start by counting those who pay. True generosity is done with one’s own money. Generosity with other people’s money goes by another name: power.

Sources

Further reading: Ryan Cardwell et al., “Milked and Feathered: The Regressive Welfare Effects of Canada’s Supply Management Regime,” Canadian Public Policy, vol. 41, no. 1, 2015; Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942); Commission of Inquiry on the Awarding and Management of Public Contracts in the Construction Industry (Charbonneau Commission), final report, 2015; Frédéric Bastiat, “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen” (1850). Quotations from French sources are the author’s translations.

Want to argue back? Here is your ammunition:

  • Drivers get their own free ride: nobody ever mails them the bill for traffic jams and exhaust.
  • The French-language market is only so big; without grants, much of this work would never exist. That is a market failure, not a privilege.
  • Supply management costs the treasury nothing and keeps farms and prices steady. American farmers can only dream.
  • Group purchasing gets volume discounts; hand out cheques, and who knows whether the $127 ends up as pencils or beer.